We are living in the best era for gaming

[SvennoJ]

Nah, it's going downhill with MTX and other predatory practices, early access games disguised as live service games sold at full price, and other buggy releases requiring a day one patch on release then another couple months to get the game in shape. Game play is now secondary to monetization in most games, biggest proof of that is GT7. Launch unfinished, patch everything that threatens the MTX model first, broken lobbies and split screen are still waiting for essential fixes 4 months after release. FS2020 has similar issues. Add more content to keep players engaged, which just adds more bugs, long standing essential issues never get fixed (slow down over longer flights, ATC stops working on longer flights, uneven ground at landing due to photogrammetry ground height disparities)

Plus this always online stuff is extremely annoying. Not only does GT7 not work at all without internet, my Series X was rendered useless yesterday with the country wide internet outage. I couldn't play anything, no downloaded games, no disc games, everything needed me to sign into my MS account when trying to go beyond the title screen. I couldn't add a guest account either to get around the issue, just locked out. Go online to set up an offline account... err, I didn't even have a working phone. (Luckily it still worked as a blu-ray player since TV was out as well, and of course Switch and PS4/PS5 still worked fine)

Yesterday have showed me to stick to physical releases and avoid streaming. Heck, I couldn't even get my car serviced yesterday. Needed an oil change, got send back because their computers were down due to the outage. I didn't know oil had to be downloaded :p

The best era for gaming were the 90s and the first two years of PSVR. That made me feel the wonders of the 90s again, experimentation with game play instead of the shiniest visuals.